using the v3 - anyone willing to share their experience

[Gudy]

No, the V3 doesn't have dictionary support, AFAIK. (But then, I didn't know you could use your own fonts on the V3, so who knows...)

And yes, I think it was worth it. I'd like to see the bugs fixed (occasional freezes, no named entity support in html and FB2 files, RAR and ZIP support spotty), the documentation improved (ZIP support, font upload), and Mobipocket support added (in that order), but the device is usable as is and except for the occasional freeze, all these issues can be worked around, at least by an experienced user.

That said, I wouldn't recommend the V3 for just everyone. For the average user, the CyBook Gen3 or the Sony PRS-505 probably provide the smoother experience. Both of these were hot contenders for my money, but the complete lack of support outside the USA essentially killed the Sony, and the price combined with the (perceived) support problems from Bookeen made me choose the V3 over the CyBook.

[torbich]

Originally Posted by redbaron101

btw, does the v3 have dictionary support?

No, V3 doesn't have dictionary support now, but I hope that in near future (3-4 months) it will.

[reycat]

While I really like my V3, there's one thing that has been bugging me ever since I got it.

Does your V3 take 5, 10 or even 15 seconds in opening a FB2 book? And does it take about 1 or 2 seconds before flashing and changing the page?

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by reycat

Does your V3 take 5, 10 or even 15 seconds in opening a FB2 book? And does it take about 1 or 2 seconds before flashing and changing the page?

I've definitely noticed the former, but not the latter. But then, I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to that.

I imagine what happens in the time it takes to open an FB2 file is that the application goes through the whole file and formats it in order to determine the number of pages in the book at the current font settings. Playing around with those, as well as the zoom levels, might give more of an idea.

I'll check this out a bit when I'm home tonight.

It turns out that opening one particular FB2 book from the book shelf took just shy of 10 seconds from the button click until the last read page appears on the screen. Reformatting the same book after a font change took a bit less than 5 seconds. This leaves 5 seconds for the software to open the zip on the SD card, extract and load the file, and go to the last visited page. Which, on reflection, seems a bit much.

Going to the next page in this book took about 2 seconds from the button click until the new page was displayed. The larger part of this was spent doing whatever before the screen flip, so this is not a problem with the actual screen being slow.

Halving those numbers would be nice.

[reycat]

Originally Posted by Gudy

I've definitely noticed the former, but not the latter. But then, I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to that.

I imagine what happens in the time it takes to open an FB2 file is that the application goes through the whole file and formats it in order to determine the number of pages in the book at the current font settings. Playing around with those, as well as the zoom levels, might give more of an idea.

I'll check this out a bit when I'm home tonight.

It turns out that opening one particular FB2 book from the book shelf took just shy of 10 seconds from the button click until the last read page appears on the screen. Reformatting the same book after a font change took a bit less than 5 seconds. This leaves 5 seconds for the software to open the zip on the SD card, extract and load the file, and go to the last visited page. Which, on reflection, seems a bit much.

Going to the next page in this book took about 2 seconds from the button click until the new page was displayed. The larger part of this was spent doing whatever before the screen flip, so this is not a problem with the actual screen being slow.

Halving those numbers would be nice.

Thank you, it seems your results are the same as mine.

I also think that 10 seconds for opening a book is too much, but I don't do it so often it bothers me.

Howewever, I do change pages a lot (about once per page, go figure ) and find the delay quite annoying. I'd say it's a matter of the V3 not pre-caching the next/previous page before showing it. I hope they can fix it with a firmware update.

By the way... I've found the V3 battery life is much, much better than my old PRS-500's, and much, much, much better than my girlfriend's PRS-505's.

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by reycat

I'd say it's a matter of the V3 not pre-caching the next/previous page before showing it. I hope they can fix it with a firmware update.

That should certainly be possible, yes. Heck, since the CoolReader engine is available as Open Source from sourceforge.net, I'd give it a shot myself if I had the time and energy to start such a project right now.

Something else that caught my eye was the following line in the release notes of the latest version: "Added support for HTML entity in FB2 (& ", etc.)"

Now there is something to look forward to in the next firmware update!

[torbich]

Originally Posted by Gudy

That should certainly be possible, yes. Heck, since the CoolReader engine is available as Open Source from sourceforge.net, I'd give it a shot myself if I had the time and energy to start such a project right now.

CoolReader tuning up is already in progress. There is experimental firmware with new (lets call it beta version) CoolReader. The list of improvements is huge, caching of the next page - is one of them (another one - is changing fonts "on the fly"). But the result is not so good - about 1.6 sec/page turn. As the author says, it is a problem with display driver, it is the reason of a delay.

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by torbich

[Uploading your own fonts] is possible now for FB2/TXT formats. All you need - is to download cr3.zip file (for example, from here, unpack it to the /crengine folder of the SD card, copy your favorite fonts to \fonts folder and edit fb2.css file for your needs. Turn Off and On your V3 for the changes to apply.

I've played around some more with this, and it doesn't work reliably. The fb2.css works just fine, but quite a few fonts apparently don't work. The Lucida Bright and Lucida Sans fonts from a Win2k/Office2k3 installation don't work. Neither does Palatino Linotype from a WinXP installation. Redhat's Liberation fonts work just fine, though.

Interestingly, the Palatino font works under the Windows version of Coolreader 3.0.8, while the Lucida fonts at least have the good grace to consistently refuse to work both on the V3 and under Windows. But then, only having the Lucida fonts and the corresponding fb2.css in the crengine directory, but no other fonts, makes Coolreader refuse to even start up under Windows, while on the V3 it continues working...

[torbich]

Originally Posted by Gudy

I've played around some more with this, and it doesn't work reliably. The fb2.css works just fine, but quite a few fonts apparently don't work.

Check up the font file extension - for Windows both .ttf and .TTF are fine, but V3 (and Linux) are case-sensitive, so only .ttf files are considered as fonts, not .TTF.

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by torbich

Check up the font file extension - for Windows both .ttf and .TTF are fine, but V3 (and Linux) are case-sensitive, so only .ttf files are considered as fonts, not .TTF.

That's not it. The files are named Palatino-Regular.ttf etc. They contain no spaces, and the file extension is ttf, not TTF. Besides, as I said, CoolReader 3.0.8 under Windows also had problems loading some fonts and even refused to start with only Lucida Sans and Lucida Bright (both in regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic) in the fonts folder.

[mrdini]

Originally Posted by Gudy

That's not it. The files are named Palatino-Regular.ttf etc. They contain no spaces, and the file extension is ttf, not TTF. Besides, as I said, CoolReader 3.0.8 under Windows also had problems loading some fonts and even refused to start with only Lucida Sans and Lucida Bright (both in regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic) in the fonts folder.

Just a guess - tried DOS-standard 8.3 file names? i.e. palatinr.ttf, lucidasa.ttf, and lucidabr.ttf?

[Gudy]

Nope. The problem turned out to be something else entirely: I managed to get the two drives (internal flash and SD card) mixed up, and the whole crengine spiel only works on the SD card, but not on the internal flash drive.

Which I think is bogus. The 10 MB of the internal flash drive is far too small to store a significant part of my library, but would be just fine for all the system stuff, namely the PDF manual and the crengine folder. Also,when you boot the device up with the SD card inserted, it defaults to the root of the SD card, so accessing books on the internal flash drive always takes two more button clicks in order to switch to the internal drive first.

This suggests a kind of natural way to keep things neat and tidy: put the system stuff (crengine folder, PDF manual) on the internal flash drive and your library on the SD card. Except that doesn't work.

:-(

[ibat]

My experience using crengine is full of trial and errors. The reader is very picky about "fb2.css" I had problems using css comments, newlines using pt or px in body etc.

body { text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;  font-family: "FreeSerif", serif; font-size: 12pt }

this didn't work

...
body { text-align: justify; text-indent: 1em;  font-family: "FreeSerif", serif; font-size: 85% }
...

this works and is my current setting. You can get "FreeSerif" at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by ibat

My experience using crengine is full of trial and errors. The reader is very picky about "fb2.css" I had problems using css comments, newlines using pt or px in body etc.

Yeah, I noticed that all the example fb2.css files I saw set the font size in %, and I kind of suspected a problem like this but never tried to see whether that was actually the case. Thanks for saving me the time. ;-)

CoolReader only supports a subset of css, and I'm fine with this, as I think that we don't really need full-blown css support to get decently formatted e-books. But knowing exactly what works (and what doesn't) would be nice.

Originally Posted by ibat

You can get "FreeSerif" at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/

Thanks for the link. I'm still not 100% happy with my current font settings (I've switched from the Liberty fonts back to Lucida Sans and Bright because the height difference between small and capital letters in the Liberty fonts wasn't big enough for my taste), and I always like to know what others are using.

[wapcaplit]

Just took delivery of one of these. Like it so far.

One niggle seems to be the susceptibility of the device to large changes in visual output after firmware upgrade. That niggle, though, is tempered by the thought that I just skipped about 10 firmware levels (v1.23 to the latest 1.25).

The device seems to be quite sensitive to carriage return (\r) processing. A bit odd to rely so heavily on dos (windoze) formatting techniques on a Linux based device. Fortunately I'm a programmer so I'm post-processing a lot of material using the usual commandline Linux tools (and perl...a lot of perl).

The latest firmware (2008-01-29) seems to have snafu'd RTF formatted text for me...the unit just isn't processing whatever benighted technique rtf uses to move from one line to the next...weird output abounds.

At this point I'm (sort of) enjoying myself translating the material I have onhand to .fb2 (FictionBook) format, which frankly kicks butt compared to everything else I'm looking at. Having trouble finding repositories of e-books which are in .fb2 format (and aren't in cyrillic). Still, most works are relatively easy to convert...although the density of poetry in Lewis Carroll can be a challenge.

Well this turned into a ramble, didn't it.

What do I think of the reader itself? Based on under 24 hours usage - its great.